Free The Case of the Double Bumblebee Sting by John R. Erickson Page A

she had hic made for me up by the water well, which was just fine. I’d always wanted to die from snake­bite beside a water well. On a pallet of rags.
    I climbed the hill and collapsed on my bed. She went back to the house and resumed her work. I could see her face framed in the window, and for the rest of the day, I stared at her, drooled, and hicked, just to prove that I was a free dog and this was a free ranch and I could hick and drool and stare any time I hic wanted to.
    Human compassion is a very strange emotion. It seems to flourish after huge disasters, but let a poor dog get a little case of hiccups and it withers like a vase of hic.
    Wildflowers.
    Did I survive through the night? You’ll soon find out.

Chapter Twelve: History Seems to Repeat Itself, Doesn’t It?

    N o, I didn’t perish in the night, in case you were worried, and thanks for worrying. I’m glad somebody was worried about me.
    I didn’t perish in the night, but I didn’t sleep so well either, because of all the stupid hicking. Take my word for it, the worst part of being snake­bit isn’t the swelling or the pain or the drooling. It’s the hiccups.
    But I felt much better the next day, and the day after that I had returned to my normal, robust state of health. The swelling had pretty muchly gone down. I could talk like a normal dog, without drooling or sounding goofy.
    And, thank goodness, the hiccups had passed—although I don’t want to talk much about them, for fear they might . . .
    Hic. Return.
    See? You have to be very foxy with these. I won’t even say the word. The point is, they went away and I don’t want them back.
    Yes, by the third day of my recovery period, the snakebite and all its unpleasant aftereffects had become a distant memory. Had it actually happened to me, or had I merely dreamed the whole thing? Shucks, I felt so good that it didn’t matter.
    The very best part of feeling good was that I settled the score between me and Kitty-Kitty. You might recall that Pete had . . . well, he’d done something. I couldn’t remember exactly what, but it had been serious enough that I’d held a grudge for three days.
    And I’m not the kind of dog who goes around holding grudges for three days, even against cats, so that tells you that whatever Pete had done, it had been pretty derned serious.
    Around ten o’clock that morning, I spotted him down by the yard gate. No doubt, he had gobbled down all the breakfast goodies and was waiting for someone to deliver the lunch scraps and lay them down between his paws.
    Typical cat. Too lazy to walk three steps for his next meal, and we could forget about him catching mice in the feed barn or the machine shed. That required much too much effort, and never mind that catching mice was his mainest job on the ranch.
    Your typical cat takes care of himself, fellers, and the rest of the world can go to blazes.
    I could see, even at a great distance, that Pete needed a good thrashing. He was just lying there, see, getting fatter and worthlesser by the minute; purring, twitching the end of his tail, and playing with a cricket that had walked past.
    We can be sure that Pete hadn’t troubled himself to find the cricket. That would have required some effort.
    So, feeling wonderful and wishing to settle an old score, I went creeping down to the yard gate on paws that made not a sound. At a distance of two feet from the end of his tail, I paused and initiated the procedure which we call, if you will for­give the heavy-duty technical terms, which we call “Kitty’s Wakeup Call.”
    ROOF, ROOF!
    Hiss, reeeeer!
    Heh, heh.
    I loved it. It was a wonderful sight, watching Kitty turn wrongside-out and scramble up the nearest tree. It made my whole day. It made my whole week. It made me proud to be a dog.

    But only moments later, my ears picked up the sound of an unidentified vehicle approaching headquarters from the north. I